Australians and Americans: Observing the 1874 Transit Down Under

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Australia was one of the best places from which to observe in 1874 as the transit was visible, at least on the country's east coast, from beginning to end. All three state observatories, at Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, mounted observing campaigns. Their efforts were augmented by two American observing teams in Tasmania, one at Hobart led by the well-known U.S. Naval Observatory astronomer William Harkness and the other at Campbell Town that was there almost by there by accident.
In this talk I will tell the story of the Australian efforts plus those of the two American expeditions to Tasmania. The emphasis from the Australian observations will be on those of Sydney Observatory as out of that work came the book `Observations of the transit of Venus, 9 December, 1874’ by Henry Chamberlain Russell. The book has such excellent coloured illustrations that almost every popular article and book on the transit of Venus reproduces some of them. I will not only show examples of those illustrations, but also images of some of the original water colour illustrations found in the Observatory archives.

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